Where do you draw the line? If you study or are collecting rare books and pamphlets and historical ephemera, are you interested in any kind of printing?

If you find a nice early nineteenth century label, are you still interested in it if it is attached to a bottle? Do you wish that the exquisitely engraved eighteenth-century cabinetmakers’ trade card was not affixed to the underside of a Chippendale desk?

Is stenciling considered printing? Would your collection include an American flag stenciled over with presidential campaign slogans and images of Abraham Lincoln? How about a poetical American broadside or an engraving by F. O. C. Darley printed on silk? Who catalogs the collection of printed matchbook covers? The librarian? An art curator?

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Illustrated above are colorful, printed silk cigar ribbons from New England. They have been attractively arranged and frugally stitched together to create a piecework quilt. The resulting piece, possibly intended as a pillow cover for a nineteenth century man-cave, is a graphic display of visual Americana; ordinary cigar labels transformed into an arresting geometric pattern suitable for home decor.

Realia. From silkscreened Rockwell Kent milk bottles to abolitionist silk purses imprinted with anti-slavery images. Where do you draw the line?

Perhaps the answer to our original question is don’t draw the line. Print culture can’t be neatly confined to bookshelves or in albums and flat print cases.